In many of today’s institutions, implementation of a new product idea or product enhancement takes months, if not years. This is the result of complex IT environments and infrastructure; change control and the need for production stability and reliability, security considerations etc. – the list is long. Wouldn’t it be great if one could implement a new product idea in weeks?
Ostia’s Portus technology is an answer to this problem.
Portus is a technology for the creation of clever test systems on demand. It tackles the challenge of making complex IT test systems available quickly and on demand by creating simulations of the required links to the back office IT systems. This enables test systems to be made available sooner thus reducing the test timeline from months (according to our reference customers) to weeks or even days. This converts to earlier delivery of new or enhanced applications with less risk and at reduced cost. Portus test systems can be created in days, on cost effective commodity hardware and software, and made available on demand and as required.
For the business, developers and testers, Portus removes the constraints of:
- Test resource availability; costly, restricted access and time taken to deliver test systems
- Test data quality; integrity challenges and not being fully representative
These constraints typically result in testing being squeezed towards the end of the development cycle.
Portus tackles these constraints head on:
- Replicated services and data – simulations of the required links to the back office
- Dynamic responses
- Resources are charged by use and delivered as required
- Can have multiple concurrent versions
Thus Portus supports true iterative and agile development from prototyping right through to product release.
How does Portus work?
The developer or tester uses Portus to create simulated links to the back office IT by simply providing the service or interface description for the required back office functions. Portus uses this description to create simulated links against which the developer or tester can work independently without impact on the real services or on each other.
Further, from these descriptions, Portus has the capability of creating synthetic, but entirely realistic data associated with the real service allowing new and enhanced products to be tested fully as if they are communicating with the real system.
In addition, the Portus Platform also offers the capability to access data and applications on legacy systems. This can be used to source and mask data from environments such as IBM Mainframe (CICS, VSAM, COBOL etc.), IBM Power Systems (AS/400), AIX, Solaris etc. for test purposes, some organizations use Portus to integrate Cloud applications with on premise systems.
